Michael Ayton wrote on 03/11/21 at 12:51:46:


If you're planning on playing that way anyway it might be worth looking at 5..a5!?  I doubt if it changes much genuine but might amuse/disconcert white

Or even on move 3, but I'm not sure if a5 is any use if white goes c3, Bd3 etc and not  e5.

ReneDescartes wrote on 03/11/21 at 00:34:10:


One thing I like about the French is that each side has so many distinctive strategic choices.

I recently looked towards 3Nd2 Nf6 because of prior familiarity and because it leads to typically French type of play. I will continue to consider 3...Nf6 and the somewhat related 3...Be7. However perhaps they play into the strength of 3Nd2, namely white's ability to play c3 at some point.

I remember when the knock on 3Nd2 was that black could reply 3...c5, which is rather dubious after 3Nc3. GM Uhlmann played 3Nd2 c5 4exd exd regularly until he had a setback against Karpov. It is certainly playable, but it seems to me that black gets "activity" rather than "initiative" as compensation for his isolated queen pawn.

Watson introduced 4...Qxd5 to many of his readers. The main line seems adequate, but perhaps overly sharp for my tastes. GM Vallejo Pons at Chess24 has suggested a new wrinkle for black (also covered in ChessPublishing):

1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 c5 4. ed5 Qd5 5. Ngf3 cd4 6. Bc4 Qd7 7. Nb3 Nc6 8. O-O Nf6 9. Nbd4 Nd4 10. Nd4 a6

The main move is 6...Qd6. 6...Qd7 looks very odd to me and I'm not surprised that it was not an early choice. On the other hand it is not like the queen is vulnerable to moves like Ne5 or Ba4 in this position. On the positive side black need not move his queen before developing the king bishop beyond e7. Black will develop his queen bishop to b7. Black scores well with 6...Qd7 in both human games and with the engines (at least after a cursory check on my part).

I used to play that old ...Nf6 main line with 11...Qb6, which was fine, and recently I've been playing the IQP ...c5 lines. But one nice thing about the Morozevich ...Nf6 and ...Be7 lines is that you can semi-force the King's Indian Attack into them with the most common move orders, as Watson shows in Play the French 4. Maybe that's too strong a term, but you can make it so that White's best is to go into it, even though avoiding the pawn chain variations was often White's motivation for the KIA in the first place.

After a break of several years, I decided to play the French again. I looked at recent recommendations for black. Several authors recommend 3Nd2 c5 4exd Qxd5. While this may be good, it feels more like the Sicilian than the French to me.

Brushing up on theory, I looked at an old main line.
1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nd2 Nf6 4. e5 Nfd7 5. Bd3 c5 6. c3 Nc6 7. Ne2 cd4 8. cd4 f6 9. ef6 Nf6 (Qxf6) 10. Nf3 Bd6 11. O-O

I have older books. To catch up on theory I looked at the table of contents (or index of variations) of newer books:  Watson (2012), Berg (2015), and Moskalenko (2015) all cover this.

11...Qc7 (11...0-0, 11...Qb6) 12. Bg5!? O-O 13. Rc1!

I think 13Rc1! best hinders black's counter-play.

At this point, Berg's book seems especially thorough. Berg, volume 3 chapter 18, continues with 13...Ng4!? 14. Ng3 g6! (his notations). Berg covers at least three responses: 15Bb5, 15Nh4, and 15Nd2. Presumably he has answers for each. However black has scored very poorly following either of the knight moves. I could buy Berg's book, but I'm not so sure I should.

Books by recent authors have also covered 3...Be7, and 3...h6. Those moves can each lead to the universal system (white knights on f3 and d2). Black may reason that he is better off avoiding the white knight arrangement (Nf3 and Ne2) of the line discussed above. I've looked briefly at these lines too. I'm leaning towards 3...Be7, but I'm not ready to shelve 3...Nf6 just yet. Any ideas or suggestions?